'A fine little book you can read in a day – 168 pages for just £3.50 on Kindle. Anderson and Davey have taken advantage of the vast amount of research into communism since the end of the cold war. They wear it lightly, and refreshingly, are open about their political position. As members of the democratic left, they believe that communism was a disaster for left wing politics. It tied the left to tyranny and the lies and disillusion that went with it.'NICK COHEN

From the introduction: ‘It is nearly a quarter-century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Union has not existed since 1991. No one under the age of 40 has more than childhood memories of communist rule in what was once the Soviet bloc. So why bother about the Soviet Union and the British left now?
The main reason is that it is a fascinating story in itself. But it also matters today. It is impossible to understand the left in Britain now unless you get to grips with the historical left’s myriad relationships with Bolshevism from the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

‘For three-quarters of a century, the different strands of the left in Britain (as elsewhere in the world) defined themselves to an extraordinary extent by reference to the Bolsheviks and the regime they established. And many of the battle lines drawn then still survive, albeit much modified…

‘This pamphlet is not an attempt to tell the story of the global impact of the Russian revolution. It is focused specifically on Britain. It is not an academic monograph, and it is not primarily a history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It is a popular overview, BBC History-style, an attempt to tell the big story of the relationship of the whole British left to the Soviet Union since 1917, dealing as much with the non-communist left and critics of the Soviet Union as with the CPGB or the fellow-travellers.’